Recent reviews by albino_munchkin

Mind-blowingly lazy cash grab that shamelessly asks you to fork over money for a game you probably already own that fixed 0 of the bugs and problems of the original.

I'm genuinely stunned they had the gall to call this "remastered" when you STILL get horrendous framerate drops in Blighttown, which is even more embarrassing when you consider how much more powerful the hardware is that most of us are using now compared to ten years ago.

There's actually more bugs in the code than in the lore

EDIT: Was tempted to change my review to positive in light of Sony backing down, and immediately after the devs release ANOTHER terrible balance patch that sucks the remaining fun out of the game. Staying negative for now. Devs seem to have launched a fun game completely as an accident and are now course-correcting to make it terrible. We'll see if they figure out how to make it fun again.

First, the story quests are boring, tedious, buggy time-wasters. We're talking bugs that can stop you from completing the quest even though this DLC has been almost out for 2 years.

If you're lucky and the game actually allows you to complete the story, your only reward (other than a terrible time wasting mechanic where you can get about 10 million free credits an hour by doing tedious chores) is the single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unique ship in X history: The Astrid. A ship that takes, with no exaggeration, 60 or 70+ kilometers to come to a full stop from travel drive. A ship where the relationship between your steering and the actual direction of the ship alternates between opposite and nonexistent. Trying to steer this ship will put you in an insane asylum. Trying to steer this ship will give you stage 5 brain cancer. That's right, it's so bad it causes a new stage of brain cancer that doesn't even exist. A stage where your brain already got cancer and died, then came back to life to get even more cancer and die again. Trying to use the Astrid as a player ship is like a fever dream where you're trying to open a door-knob while your hands are covered in WD-40, only to look down and realize you actually don't have hands, you only have stumps where hands used to be and those are also covered in WD-40.

Oh, and by the way, if you can't complete the main quest, you'll have infinite enemy ships spawning all throughout the galaxy whose only purpose in life is to destroy every piece of player-character property they can get to. So hopefully your save doesn't get bugged because be prepared to throw it away and start over if so.

One of the things that makes this so difficult is that you can't keep your ships alive during this critical stage of the quest because, despite it being like 6 years since this came has come out, the NPC pilot AI is still brain-dead. I literally watched a ship whose ONLY order was to fly to a nearby sector instead decide to perform the following: Undock, fly the OPPOSITE DIRECTION they were supposed to go, JUMP THROUGH A GATE INTO ENEMY SPACE despite having no orders to do so, and IMMEDIATELY FLY TOWARDS THE NEAREST ENEMY STATION and get vaporized. And yes, I removed all their orders and assignments before giving the order AND checked their behavior tab to make sure they didn't have any other orders.

Seriously, the AI pilots in this game are addicted to committing suicide worse than the people camping behind my local 7/11 are addicted to methamphetamines. You can install any mod you want, they cannot and will not fix this issue.

TLDR this DLC was so bad it made me want to uninstall X4 and also uninstall myself from being alive. If Mr. Beast calls and offers you ten million dollars to play this DLC, take my advice and hang up the phone. Then stomp on the phone. Then boil it. Then put it in the microwave. Then move out of the country and change your name.

Only played for a couple hours but I'm blown away by how good this game is. It's a little bit dark souls, a little bit diablo, a little bit doom (both 1993 and 2016 varieties). The combo system is fun, it's fast paced but some classes and items facilitate a more patient play style if thats what you enjoy. Conversely, other items encourage a faster pace that makes you feel like doomguy ripping and tearing through demons. Honestly the only thing I feel like I'm missing when I play this game is the doom eternal soundtrack.

Sometimes roguelikes bother me because runs are so hit-or-miss dependent upon RNG and getting overpowered items. But mortal sin has items everywhere, you can instantly sell the ones you don't want with 1 button (no annoying inventory management or only getting to sell things at arbitrary checkpoints like other roguelikes), fairly generous amounts of "essence" i.e. souls carry over to the next run when you die, as well as exp, so you never feel like you wasted time even when you have a bad run. Different items for different play styles are actually viable and competitive with each other so you aren't always pigeonholed into one or two dominant builds like a lot of other games. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice a fun build you enjoy for a boring one that gets you through the run. So many games could learn lessons from this game's design and balance.

of course the visuals, art direction, and music are nice too. If you feel visually overwhelmed when you start the game, just start turning all the visual options (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc) down one notch at a time until it feels right, e.g. instead of all 0.5's in settings, change it to all 0.4 or all 0.3. otherwise the sky is insanely bright and the actual level itself is too dark to see, at least that was my experience with default display settings.

I think this game had a lot more thought and care put into it than what I see from a lot of AAA games these days. Oh, and unlike every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AAA release these days this game doesn't have horrible framerate, stuttering, glitches, crashes, bugs etc etc constantly even though it's early access and a lot of that could be forgiven. But I don't have to forgive it, because it actually works.

The only reason not to play this game is if you hate fun or you hate yourself.

Disclaimer that I got this game at a very steep discount and if I had paid $25 for it this review would probably be a thumbs down.

If you wanted to see 100% of the content I think you'd have to do like between 5 and 7 runs but after even 1 or 2 runs you've seen most of the scares, because they're all fairly similar to each other with slight variations.

Your character can't really get hurt or die from the scares up until the moment you actually fail a run (which is pretty telegraphed). So this takes the tension away a little bit but I still thought a lot of it was very creepy.

The job-simulator aspects of it seemed immersive at first but trying to do subsequent runs I realized there is so little variation to the embalming process that doing it more than a couple times starts to feel like a real chore.

There is a little bit of a story that plays out across successful runs but honestly the game couldn't really keep me entertained long enough for me to justify playing through it that many times and I ended up just watching it on youtube.

I would basically treat this as buying a ticket to an interactive horror movie because that's essentially what you're paying for: About 2-3 hours of decent scares and some creepy ambiance with a light sprinkling of story. It is absolutely not worth 25 dollars but if you can get it for 5-10 then I would say its good.

UPDATED: After spending another 10-15 hours on it I can say that my stance on the game has softened a bit and it makes me wish Steam had some kind of neutral option. I could probably recommend it with a massive caveat that the first 15ish hours are going to feel like beating your head against a brick wall making no progress, followed by the difficulty curve going from a wall to a sheer cliff: once you start getting access to end-game items, every mission becomes borderline trivial. It's one of the weirdest progression/difficulty curves I've seen in a game. The whiplash from "this game is impossible, I give up," to "this game holds almost no challenge left whatsoever" occurs over the course of just a couple hours once you make it far enough into the game. And currently the game doesn't have much of an "end-game", once you start clearing missions regularly and stop dying constantly, it only takes a couple hours to accrue enough resources to trade for all the end-game armors and weapons, at which point the game is effectively over because you have nothing left to work towards. It kind of makes me want to start a new game, but the game in its current state does not support multiple save files (I have no idea why this is the case). My feeling about this game is that if you are someone who doesn't have a lot of spare time (or you're cash-strapped and trying to optimize your entertainment budget), there is a strong chance you'll pay 20 dollars just to either get frustrated and uninstall, or get about 20ish hours of value before you get bored. It definitely requires you to "get good" which doesn't take too long but as I said, once you do get good there isn't a lot left to enjoy. It does have a lot of great qualities and it could shape up to be a fantastic game but I think that's going to require at least a few more big content patches.

ORIGINAL:

Hey hey people (actually it sucks)

Right now the main issue with this game is the way it wastes your time: when you fail a run (and you will constantly) you gain absolutely nothing from it. Compare this with other difficulty-boner roguelikes where at least some kind of resource or item can carry over to a new run (Dead Cells would be a good example of this). This game gives you absolutely nothing (other than a box of extremely basic supplies that you won't really get much use out of), and given that succeeding on a run requires excessive caution, this translates to each run being probably around an hour long. And you'll fail like 90% of them, which means you will spend 10 hours on this game to make 1 hour of progress. So the "content" in the game is artificially inflated, if you could progress at a normal rate, you would see all the content very rapidly. But since a lot of the rewards are locked behind a reputation system, and gaining rep requires actually 'winning' a run, you'll likely uninstall before you actually see most of the rewards. Which is a shame because obviously the game has a lot of potential.

Another key issue is that unlike some extraction games, you CANNOT extract at will after you get good items. You either win the run, die, or can extract after getting certain rare items (items you aren't super likely to find on the average run)
This, combined with no resources carrying over after death, is what really strangles the rate of progression in this game.

So what would fix the game imo, is one of a few things:
1) Increasing the number of conditions that can facilitate extraction. Maybe break level objectives into tiers, e.g.:
Tier one requires clearing one floor, allows extraction, but much less rewards than tier 2
Tier two requires actually completing the objectives as they exist currently.
You could break this into as many tiers as you care to hypothetically, and I think this would solve a ton of the current frustrations with the game.

2) Grant reputation and occasional reward packages based on kills instead of missions succeeded. After all, if Corporation X sees you murder 100 operatives of Corporation Y, they might want to reward your effort regardless of whether your operative survived the mission or not. This would at least give the player a trickle of rewards while they're learning the game and failing frequently.

3) Possibly just reduce the size of the levels and missions entirely. As it stands, a lot of missions are 4 floors where each floor could have dozens of enemies, many of whom could get lucky and 1-shot you. Add to this that on every planet after Mars, quasimorphosis means that the mission gets harder with every enemy you kill, and there aren't a lot of ways to avoid enemies in this game, if an enemy is in your way, you typically have to kill them. More options for stealth gameplay would go a long way towards making this mechanic more fun.

It's not a bad game per se, it's just in a state where I think you are better off skipping it unless you have gratuitous amounts of time to sink into a very RNG-heavy game with glacial progression systems. And yes, despite what people will say about "skill issues", the game is indeed very RNG-heavy in it's current state. Your character could have, for example, a 20% chance to dodge a projectile that would saw both your legs off and end your run 45 minutes in. And no, there is no amount of skill that will eliminate every single possible instance of damage in the game (of which there are, of course, many).

Right now this game really requires an amount of time that you simply won't have unless you're unemployed or 14 years old (which I suspect are statistically the two main categories of Seth enjoyers, and I say this as a huge fan of his content).

Really looking forward to seeing what future updates hold but if you saw the video and are intrigued but haven't bought it yet I think you should probably wait and see how development progresses.

if you miss telltale you should play this

still the best space 4x game in 2023 even if some of the DLCs are mid

Update after Patch 3.0: I told myself I would switch this review to recommend if I stopped finding new bugs every single day. Even after all the 3.0 bugfixes there are a million ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ broken things in this game. I want to recommend this game to anyone who has an interest in RPGs, and it would be one of my favorite games ever if, again, it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worked. 3.0 made the game a lot better but it looks like it still has months to go before you can complete a playthrough without running into a myriad of bugs that will break individual quests or entire storylines, not to mention the incredibly janky pathfinding and line of sight issues that make moment-to-moment gameplay a complete pain in the ass. Inventory management in this game is some of the worst I've seen in modern gaming and the recent patch somehow found a way to make it even worse.
At least they fixed the framerate and stability issues.

It might seem like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, after all how much can I dislike the game after playing it for 150+ hours and saying it's one of my favorites? But I'm sick and tired of modern developers releasing horribly unfinished games, and once I've already given them my money (oops) the only means of recourse I have is leaving these negative reviews.

If you have a job and work 40 hours a week, and then the game you play to have fun wastes your time with bugs that undo hours (or dozens of hours) of progress, I think you have a right to be pissed. I know I'm an old man shaking my fist at the clouds, but I remember back in the days of the N64 and Playstation 1 when bugs in games were things you found rarely, and were usually mostly visual. The worst thing you could find back then was a save getting corrupted, which really sucked but was something I encountered maybe once or twice in a whole generation of consoles. These days I can't go 30 minutes without finding something that doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

I want to remind everyone: the way that you turn one of the "good developers" like Larian into lazy cashgrabbing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like Blizzard is by showering praise on them and saying "shut up and take my money" for a game that wasn't even close to being ready to leave early access. When devs figure out they can get tons of profit and prestige from releasing unfinished games, it creates financial incentive for them to cut corners and release an even less finished product for their next development cycle.

In many ways its a great game (although mechanically a step down from WH2, it has a lot more content), but I feel obligated to add to the negative review bombing since CA has adopted a policy of using their time to make overpriced DLCs when the game still has hundreds of terrible bugs and stability problems over 18 months after release and they have made it clear they have no intent to fix any of it. You'll at least be downloading the community bugfix patch if you play this, and they can't fix everything.

Again, it's not a bad game, I just want people to know what they're getting into.